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Looking at the entries in the RISC OS Products Directory, which I manually assembled back in 2003-ish, you will see that it featured details of 2923 RISC OS products. I am pleased to announce that the new-improved RISC OS Search Engine spidering process has now exceeded that figure, despite some 436 thousand URLs still to be processed. The RISC OS Search Engine currently knows about 3167 RISC OS applications, many of which can be downloaded from multiple sources throughout the world wide web. As the web-based front end is still under re-development, I shall email out today a static web page containing details of these 3167 RISC OS applications to the various RISC OS portals in the hope that such information can be disseminated as widely as possible.

I haven’t tried gcc yet.
Glad I left mention of how I added the middle button. Accidentally reset the repository and lost the functionality.
Incidentally I tried StrongKey without the menu button being mapped to the mouse. As far as RO is concerned it has the same scancode as esc, so I guess it’s just not mapped.

lies will usually need to be held accountable (not that Boris ever got censured for his £350M bus), and political funding declared and checked (how we know Leave broke the law).

What puzzles me is why the process hasn’t been subjected to normal election law.
Illegal funds, people subjected to nothing but lies from one platform etc. Normally it would trigger a re-run with the guilty party excluded. Ah, right, OK.
So the re-run would be an expensive “Our choice is remain and like it or remain”.

Well, I just learned that CARE is an acronym. I always took “care package” to mean something like “a package to help take care of you”. With that said, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase in real life (just occasionally on the Internet).

Likewise.

And while I knew that SCUBA is an acronym, I still don’t know what it stands for. “Underwater Breathing Apparatue” I guess, but SC? Dunno.

Haven’t seen it, but heard plenty of shouting from the right when it was first shown. Seems what they’re good at, shouting bollocks and if that doesn’t work, shouting louder.

As I said a long time ago, this has little to do with any democracy (before Brexit, polling put the importance of the EU at around 6%) and a lot more to do with “follow the money”. Follow the money in three senses.

In the first sense we have the rich who like the UK’s lack of regulations. They’re easy to spot, they live outside the UK, hide their taxes in loopholes, and then tell the British what to think. Barclay brothers and Murdoch are good examples. Lesser versions of this are wealthy-ish company owners who are hoping an end to EU “interference” will mean they can lobby ministers to erode workers rights.

In the second sense, we have those who have realised that wrecking the British economy is pretty much a money printing exercise. Here we have such delights as hedge fund managers who bet against the pound and cashed in, and of course the infamous Rees-Mogg (how he can continue to be an MP with a conflict of interest the size of Texas just shows how corrupt Westminster is now).

And, finally, we have the useful idiots. In other words the shouty-shouty far right nutcases who are largely funded by overseas interests. These are actually the most dangerous not only because they are fairly plentiful, but also because (like with the manipulation through social media), there is an active interest in bringing the UK down. Actually, I think they want to pretty much bring the West down, but with a useful idiot already running America, kicking the UK is basically a bit of lulz.https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/07/tommy-robinson-global-support-brexit-march

We certainly do live in interesting times. Our concept of democracy and governance has completely failed to understand the massively invasive nature of social media. There are rules for what can be said on TV or in print, lies will usually need to be held accountable (not that Boris ever got censured for his £350M bus), and political funding declared and checked (how we know Leave broke the law). Social media, on the other hand, is barely better than a pile of “a mate of a mate told me” stories being relentlessly thrown at marks (determined by algorithm) to sway their thoughts. I have not seen such a thing as I don’t bother with the likes of Facebook any more, but I would imagine it to pander to “confirmation bias”, that is to say that those people who already have a negative opinion will be fed stories designed to support and confirm their negative thoughts. Not that the clearly anti-foreigner government itself isn’t engaging in similar tactics. I mean, WTF was all that crap about emergency meetings because eight people turned up in a boat?

As for high court orders, there could be. The typical British gagging order also gags one from mentioning that they are being gagged. I think it was the Guardian that pointed out the obvious lunacy of gagging something and gagging the gag, meaning that it was extremely easy to fall foul of the gag because nobody knew it was gagged. Confused yet? It was all that stuff about some footballer’s infidelities a few years back.
Of course, anybody with half a brain would toddle over to an international incarnation of Google and simply toss in a few queries to see what came up. I did and found out in… uh… Le Figaro, I think. Not that I knew (or cared) who it was, just thought it was stupid to make a super-maxi gagging order on the entire United Kingdom when, you know, the rest of the world exists…

In another “way things are going”, there’s IPv6 on the horizon. I don’t think it will make much impact to RISC OS for a good while yet (there’s a ridiculous amount of IPv4 only kit around that I’d imagine future routers on an IPv6 Internet would fake up some sort of NAT style arrangement for the old stuff).

Yep, there’s definitely a lot of v4 stuff out there. My ISP supports v6 but my router doesn’t. If I plug my PC in directly, bypassing the router, then I can make a v6 connection, not that there’s much benefit in doing so.

People would think it odd if you said you went S.C.U.B.A. diving and found you received a C.A.R.E. package in your absence…

Well, I just learned that CARE is an acronym. I always took “care package” to mean something like “a package to help take care of you”. With that said, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase in real life (just occasionally on the Internet).

There’s more choice than I thought. More than many thought apparently. The Nexx is interesting. Can the lowest spec model have OpenWRT put on it? I noticed the ROM is half the size. I’m only asking because I don’t need the NAS functionality. As it is I have one on the network, and the router also has unused functionality for it.

It’s a shame USB networking options are limited. My old Acer netbook has damaged Wifi hardware. Ages back I got around that by setting up an old small form factor Samsung Galaxy phone (which had defctive MicroSD hardware) as a dongle of sorts I guess? It just used it’s Wifi settings.

The purpose of mine is to download the source for components listed in the components file which happen to be missing locally. I used my files as a test because part of the idea is for it to be used for porting to new platforms when there is no mention of the new platform in the CVS tree. In a way, it’s to help with rebasing.

Last night out of curiosity I ran my script in RISC OS because I had my pi + 5" screen out. Using RiscLua6 and extra wimpslot allocation it runs. Not successfully of course because of path and CVS issues. It did however get as far as trying to use CVS to download the directories it collected.

I have no idea what version of CVS I’m using right now. Apparently I have different versions on different devices. IIRC one has a yellow fish or something for an icon, and the other has a rather more default icon.

What I’m writing came about because I’ve been stalled out for months because of lack of time, access to hardware, and a completely messed up source tree which I’ve been trying to reconstruct. It has components from various places in the CVS source tree. TBQHCVS makes my heart sink when I so much as think about it.

Tonight I “caught-up” with the Channel 4 dramatisation called “Brexit: The Uncivil War”.

In itself it was very interesting and stimulating, all 93 minutes of it, and claimed to be a true story with the proviso that certain scenes had been added for dramatic continuity.

It was inter-cut with real footage, and dealt with the Remain and Leave campaigns relating to the EU referendum.

The really interesting bit, though, appeared in the ending captions, and these are well-worth watching if you haven’t got time for the whole program. Just the last 3 minutes or so!

A summary is that both AggregateQI, used by the Leave campaign itself, and Cambridge Analytica, used by the Farage lot – were both used to manipulate by targetted (US targeted) advertisements to social media users on the likes of FaceBook, and they are both financially linked to a billionaire businessman Robert Mercer – who went on to become the largest donor to the election campaign of Donald Trump.

I wasn’t aware of any of this before seeing the program.

Makes you think!

Anyway, made me think! And I haven’t noticed any High Court orders suppressing this information!

I presume that’s to stop [Russians|Chinese|whoever we hate today] from messing with DNS and bringing everything to a screeching halt?
I mean, think of the trauma if [Facebook|Instagram|Snapshat|Skype] aren’t available! People would have to… interact… with each other… it could get nasty…

In another “way things are going”, there’s IPv6 on the horizon. I don’t think it will make much impact to RISC OS for a good while yet (there’s a ridiculous amount of IPv4 only kit around that I’d imagine future routers on an IPv6 Internet would fake up some sort of NAT style arrangement for the old stuff).

Uppercase to note the Acronym status of TEA. (Like LASER, that lots of people1 spell wrong)

Shouldn’t we be pedantic and write T.E.A. and L.A.S.E.R. ? ;-)

BTW, the use of “Laser” (written like that) is a peculiarity of acronyms that are pronounced as words. You probably say something like “lay-zer” and not “ell-ay-ess-ee-are”, and this is reflected in the acronym being written in lower (or initial cap) case. Same with scuba, radar, and care package. People would think it odd if you said you went S.C.U.B.A. diving and found you received a C.A.R.E. package in your absence…

Problem identified and mostly fixed. One remaining strangeness – I understand why it’s happening, but haven’t implemented a fix yet, and it’s only strange really: if there are any completely empty chunks in a font, the Draw version (and probably the SFD version, I’ve not checked) of the font contains a copy of the next chunk in the empty chunk. Otherwise everything seems to be working fine.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand most of the code (tea? WTF is tea in a resolver?),

There are currently two DNS methods (old bog basic non-encrypted and newer encrypted) but you know that.
Modern name resolvers include facilities for encrypt/decrypt and in this case the author used Tiny Encrypt Algorithm TEA

In this case – black box, magic happens inside – unless there’s a problem when it’s in use just nod and look at the next bit.
Uppercase to note the Acronym status of TEA. (Like LASER, that lots of people1 spell wrong)

1 Particularly Americans, but then they didn’t invent it so why would they bother?)

If you are using my CVS distribution then syncrom may do what you want – in any case it is written in basic so you can see what it is doing.

There’s instructions in the file but basically you create a folder with the product name you want eg BCM2835Dev on hard disc, put !syncrom in it, ensure you have a large enough ramdisc (as it uses this to download the rom), then run !syncrom.

It will download the rom product based on the directory name. If you already have a downloaded rom in the !syncrom directory then running !syncrom again will update it to the new version with the minimum amount of changes – note it loses any changes you may have made.

This weird scheme was a response to something Rick Murray once said where he wanted to update a rom with the minimum of disc writes to save wearing out SD cards.

If you just want to download a specific component you can do that with the following taskobey file:

On the assumption that others will, like me, have FontForge on the other platform, I’m considering extending my !XP1FontEd to read SFD files, then we’ll be able to convert PostScript, otf and ttf fonts. It writes them already, but currently doesn’t read them.

The patched TTF2f does appear to be a very effective Pi stiffer, OS5.27 (17-Dec-18) on the RPi3B+. A big handful of WimpSlot, 4000k, looks to have helped. No such luck on the RPi1, unpatched or patched, OS5.24.

No problem at all on the Titanium (briefly tested), OS5.27 (06-Jan-19).

Hmm. Still issues with some fonts – doesn’t crash the program, but refuses to produce SFD files directly from the font. Strangely, the same font will convert to a set of draw files, then you can produce the SFD file from the drawfiles no problem. Simple workaround, but would like to know what’s going wrong. Investigating.

When I did that upgrade to !XP1FontEd in October 2017, I upset the facility for save SFD files. I presume no-one has tried to use it in the interim – if you did, why didn’t you let me know it was broken? As far as I know everything else !XP1FontEd does continued to work just fine.

Fixed now. Hopefully I’ve not broken anything else fixing this! No problems revealed in a quick check, but I can’t claim to have done exhaustive tests.

I’ve been using one for a year or so. The original firmware works Ok, The OpenWRT firmware allowed me to use a 3gusbmodem as well. You can edit the BSD style network config file from RISC OS using SSH login. The OpenWRT editor is Vim so I had to have a refresher on using it.
I did manage to lose it by using wrong settings once, It is documented how to connect the tx and rx up to a serial terminal to get things back in order.
If you only need the wireless and one form of NAS, The default firmware may be adequate. I think that used a capable browser for settings, I recall using RISC OS firefox to do it, or was it Oregano?
Worth the jump to OpenWRT though, plenty of help available, It auto detects most things, I currently use it to connect the Iyonix to my Phone Hotspot via wireless.
Other computers on the same wired network can use the same device by adding a switch or router to the ethernet side.
Power is by the way of micro usb socket.
Mine was closer to a tenner from ebay.

I’ve been working on a Lua script to grab any missing components for an arbitrary build tree of RISC OS. I’m absolutely stuck on cvs syntax.
I hopefully just made the project public and have the link below.

If anyone plans to actually run it, only do it in Linux. It should be considered non-functional in RO for the time being because TBQH I haven’t written that code yet. There’s still an awful lot to implement and fix.

Before anyone says it, it doesn’t detect the existence of directories yet. Like I said, lots to do.

What it can do is take the desired build as an argument eg BCM2835. It goes through the components file, finds the components and matches them to the entries in moduleDB, parses the paths and attempts to download them.

If anyone can offer some input, that’d be great.

e: if you enter no arguments it goes through the motions for the AWH3 tree, because those were the files I had handy at the time.

Didn’t run on mine yesterday (froze the machine, pointer stuck, no response to ctrl-brk – first time I’ve had to switch off and on again in over a year) – but did run on a friend’s. Not sure what model of Pi his is, he says he’s running ROS 5.21.

I’m really not sure whether I’ve got ZeroPain on mine or not – everything I normally use runs okay so I leave well alone! Pi3Bv2 running ROS 5.23.